Microsoft April 2020 Patch Tuesday comes with fixes for three zero-days

Image: ZDNet

Microsoft has published today its monthly roll-up of security updates known as Patch Tuesday.

This month’s updates are a bulky release. The OS maker has made available patches today for 113 vulnerabilities across 11 products, including three zero-day bugs that were being actively exploited in the wild.

As always, details remain scant for the time being. Details about zero-day attacks are usually kept under wraps for days or weeks, to give users time to patch and prevent attackers from developing proof-of-concept code.

The three zero-days patched this month are:

CVE-2020-1020 – A vulnerability in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library lets attacker run code on vulnerable systems. Attacks can be executed remotely. The zero-day does not impact Windows 10. Details about this zero-day became public last month, but a patch was only released today. Read more in our previous coverage here.
CVE-2020-0938 – This is a second bug in the same Windows Adobe Type Manager Library. Bug somewhat similar to the one above, but its existence was disclosed only today, unlike the first one. The Microsoft mitigations published last month, if applied, also blocked attacks exploiting this second bug.
CVE-2020-1027 – A bug in the Windows kernel lets attackers elevate privileges to run code with kernel access.
CVE-2020-0968 – ̶A̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ ̶E̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶.̶   After this article went live, Microsoft issued a correction on the CVE-2020-0968 security advisory to update its exploitation status. This bug has not been exploited in the wild before, hence, it is not a zero-day. Article content and title updated accordingly.

According to Microsoft, the first three zero-days were discovered and reported by Google’s two security teams — Project Zero and the Threat Analysis Group (TAG).

Lacking any other details, it is currently unclear if the three zero-days have been used by the same threat actor, or in the same hacking campaign.

Since Patch Tuesday updates are delivered in bulk, installing today’s updates fixes all three zero-days at once, along with the 109 other security bugs.

Additional information about this month’s Patch Tuesday is included below, including links to security fixes published by other companies:

Microsoft’s official Security Update Guide portal lists all security updates in a filterable table.
ZDNet has also put together this page listing all security updates on one single place.
Adobe’s security updates are detailed here.
SAP security updates are available here.
VMWare security updates are available here.
Google Chrome security updates were released last week, on April 7.
Oracle’s second CPU this year is available here.
The Android Security Bulletin for April 2020 is detailed here. Patches started rolling out to users’ phones last week.

Source: Information Technologies - zdnet.com